An unnamed 16-year-old student at the South Miami Senior High School has been attacking the school’s online learning platform. Since the launch of the school year on Monday, the school district has been the victim of continued Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that have overwhelmed the network with traffic to either slow it down, or cause the network to fail. Many students have been attempting to log in to the school and have been met with a “please wait” message on their screens. The school system is working with local and federal law enforcement agencies to prosecute cybercrimes. The student admitted to orchestrating eight attacks and the police chief of the school’s police department believes that the student was not working alone.
Analyst Notes
With DDoS attack services being easy to find on Darknet forums, these attacks can and will be used by people with little to no experience. Organizations should develop an incident response plan to help them mitigate cyber-attacks–attached is an article on how to develop a response plan. It is also extremely important for any organization to work with law enforcement when they are attacked. Law enforcement agencies have specific tools that are sometimes not available to private agencies.
Mitigating DDoS article: https://phoenixnap.com/blog/prevent-ddos-attacks
Source article: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/miami-high-schooler-charged-cyberattacks-stopped-online-learning-n1239219?&web_view=true
